Keyword Difficulty Checker
See how hard it is to rank for any keyword on the App Store or Google Play — scored 0–100 from the live apps currently holding the top spots.
How the difficulty score works
Review strength — 40%
How many ratings the current top 10 apps have. Heavily-reviewed incumbents are hard to displace.
Rating quality — 20%
The average star rating of the top apps. A wall of 4.8-star apps is tougher than a shaky 3.9 field.
Title match — 20%
How many top apps already use the exact keyword in their title — the strongest ranking field.
Publisher dominance — 20%
How many distinct developers hold the top spots. Fewer publishers means a more locked-up keyword.
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Why Keyword Difficulty Decides Your ASO Strategy
Every keyword you target costs scarce metadata space — the App Store gives you just 160 indexed characters across title, subtitle, and keyword field. Spending them on a keyword you can't realistically rank for wastes the inventory entirely: apps outside the top results are effectively invisible, since the top 3 capture the overwhelming majority of organic taps. Checking difficulty before committing a keyword to your metadata is the single highest-leverage step in app store keyword research.
The sweet spot for most apps is moderate-difficulty keywords with real popularity: terms where the current top 10 includes beatable apps — few reviews, imperfect ratings, or titles that don't contain the keyword. Our guide to finding competitor keywords shows how to build a candidate list worth scoring, and the iOS keywords field guide covers exactly where each winning keyword should go.
This checker uses the same scorer as AppDrift's keyword tracking, which adds daily rank history, difficulty across your whole keyword set, and alerts when your rankings move — so difficulty becomes something you monitor, not something you check once.